gosioux76

I mean, this is kind of how the cycle begins, right? A team switches to a wholly new visual brand identity to chase trends, then after 5 to 10 years misses the old look and ends up changing back. Call it Teal Pistons Syndrome. I realize the Heat have done nothing to suggest they would ditch their core brand (thankfully), and that this is merely a thought exercise, but you can sort of see the forces at play that would cause a brand to make such a move. The list of teams that have gone through this exercise is practically infamous. The Pistons, Buffalo Sabres, Atlanta Hawks, Milwaukee Bucks, Phoenix Coyotes, Milwaukee Brewers, San Diego Padres. It's like these brands go through their own freshman year of college where they take a sojourn to find themselves and suddenly come home with long hair and tattoos. Not to say that no change is good. In fact, these teams' odd choices and bad decisions sort of add to the colorful palette of sports. But there are sometimes when you just have to think, this could all have been avoided.

I feel like many people are coming to these conclusions because the alternative to the core brand is something much livelier than the original. It's a lot easier to label the Heat brand as mid-level appealing when the alternative is a hot-pink novelty look meant to emulate a 1980s TV show. It's like looking at two Mustangs side by side -- one is black, the other is neon green. Your first instinct might suggest you love the neon green because it's fresh, new and will get a lot of likes on Tik-Tok without realizing that you actually have to drive the thing and, after about six months, you'll get tired of it and wish you'd picked the black all along.

This is spot on. It also represents the conundrum the NBA and other leagues create for themselves with these uniform programs that veer from core brands. Sometimes, the designs are really good and big sellers, which inevitably prompts these existential questions of whether they should follow that revenue and adopt a new identity. We also see it with the red-rocks look in Utah and the Valley looks in Phoenix. Of those, only the Phoenix example could be adapted to still bear resemblance to the core brand. With the others, you'd be, as you said, supplanting 30+ years of brand equity. It takes discipline to disregard something that's popular for the higher purpose of protecting something like brand equity. I'm now sure how many owners these days care about such things. It's all about what's shiny and new.

That's a good question. I first noticed it in the USFL documentary that preceded the first weekend games. I just assumed it was a religious thing and saw it as a cross.

This Detroit City nonsense aside, supporters groups are one of the most unique aspects of professional soccer at all levels that set the gameday experience apart from other pro sports. Without them, pro soccer games would just be another Pavolovian Jumbotron call-and-response light show played to the tune of Top 40 hits, like you see at NHL or NBA games. The sounds of the game are those orchestrated by the SG. I'm the opposite of many of you. When I lived in Portland and frequented Timbers games, I wanted to be as close to the Timbers Army as possible. Here in St. Louis, where I live now, the St. Louligans are a group of really great humans trying their damndest to do it right. Certainly, not all SGs are the same, and I'm sure there's plenty of bad examples. But for my money, they're the defining factor that make pro soccer far more accessible to the average fan than other pro sports.

Royal then. I mistyped, but you get the point.

Somewhere in the shadows sits an overpaid political strategist who's feeling very proud of himself for convincing the mayor of Dallas that people will remember to vote for a guy who merely suggested getting another NFL team. That same guy likely was once elected student class president in high school by promising more soda machines and pizza on the school lunch menu.

I'll even go so far as to say I like the new logo. If the goal was to shift toward simple, dignified and stately, then it's on the mark. Looks nice on a helmet, too.

If color balance is a concern, then the best option is to keep the mask white. There's a natural progression to the color patterns on that helmet as is -- navy royal to light blue to white -- that would be disrupted by unnecessarily forcing a colored face mask onto the helmet. The design treats the helmet as a whole rather than individual parts that need their own colors. That's the beauty of it.

This discussion of the Phoenix market is fascinating. I presume the conventional wisdom back in the '90s took into account the high number of cold-weather transplants and presumed that, at the metro area's growth rate, the market would have generated enough new-generation fans to build a growing and sustainable fan base. That this apparently hasn't been the case, despite still being the nation's third fastest-growing metro area, is kind of fascinating.

Ha! Yeah, I find myself in agreement with Barkley a lot more often than I'm not. As a T-Wolves fan, I was a little unsettled by his harsh criticism of Karl-Anthony Towns in the playoffs, but by the end of that Grizzlies series I'd come around to agreeing with him.

I'm completely with you on this point. I've long missed the old NBA where the dislike among teams was palpable. I also missed the era of the post-up game mastered by powerful centers who battled it out every night in the paint. But I think the Warriors -- fairly or not -- have become somewhat symbolic representations of the root causes of those lost elements of the game that I loved. As others mentioned, the league-wide attempt to replicate the Warriors' three-point-focused game made the league too one-dimensional. The old man in me doesn't want to see Karl Anthony-Towns firing up three pointers -- I want to see him mastering elegant post moves the way Olajuwon and Ewing did back in the day. Is that the Warriors' fault? Certainly not; they found a winning formula and the rest of the league tried to match it. But I still identify them with that shift. And while Lebron's buddy-fest in Miami should really be the source of my ire for the superteam era, KD's move to Golden State was the one that left me legitimately disgusted at the league. Admittedly, the issue is less about Golden State as it is KD. I admired that earlier era where Bird, Jordan, Magic, Isaiah, etc., would fight their way to championships with the teams that drafted them. I had hoped KD, after coming so close with OKC, would follow a similar path. I don't mean to judge someone for making a move for personal reasons, but I've come to view KD as someone who favored the easy path to a ring rather than carrying the burden himself. So if I have any animosity toward the Warriors, it's for these reasons. But they've earned the reputation and the success they've enjoyed, especially this current crop of mostly home-grown players.

I don't think Montreal's logo is terrible, it's just genuinely uninspiring, particularly with colors like navy, black and silver. It might be slightly more appealing if applied to a brighter color palette, or at least it would stand out more than it does. Overall, it's a good thing that teams are becoming more receptive to the feedback. It's easy to criticize teams and say they should have received more feedback during the creation of the logo so they could've avoided this, but I have to imagine it's not easy to do that adequately without the risk of it leaking to the public. But I might be giving them too much benefit of the doubt.

Yes. Absolutely.

I'm not sure if this is an unpopular opinion, but I really liked the Mets off-white pinstriped uniforms. But my ideal Mets uniform would a return to the '86 Mets look, but adapted to the modernized button-down style like Minnesota and Texas have done recently with updates to their old pullover-style jerseys.

I think these are great colors on their own. But I think this is one of those examples where a color scheme can work, but maybe not for a team known more for brighter shades. There seemed to be a trend in the late '90s/early '00s in which teams with brightly-colored palettes switched to more muted tones (the Canucks, Brewers, Eagles, among others), which I presume was the result of teams chasing color trends at the time. I'm glad the Oilers reverted back to the Gretzky-era colors. It's what they should always look like.

I would assume, at this point, that they'd just stand pat with what they're already wearing. If they're this late in the game reacting to fan sentiment, it would be the only practical approach. The music note statue color switcheroo would seem like one tiny clue toward that conclusion.

I caught this, too. And if intentional, it's clever. But I’m bothered by the arch having something of a peak created by the sword. It almost looks like the beginning of a wishbone. This also gives the overall shape of the logo something of an igloo shape, or of the sort of bell you'd see at a hotel front desk. Proportionately, I don't think it works as a helmet logo. One suggestion: use this as a secondary sleeve logo, with the Scottish Claymores design on the helmet. They would play well as variants of each other and give your overall logo package more depth and versatility.

That was my first thought, too. But I also kind of see it as a take on how a hockey sweater might translate into a football uniform, which is sort of an interesting exercise on its own. (I realize it's probably been done a million times on our concepts board already.) It's also another version of a football uniform that minimizes the use of numbers. I'm sure the numbers are prominent on the back, but in addition to being really small on the front, this design also does away with TV numbers.

If anything, the Coyotes pricing strategy should, theoretically, really test the premise that stadium location has been their biggest challenge, especially if they end up having no trouble attracting fans at substantially higher ticket prices. But what I think will likely happen? They'll fill up this tiny arena with only the hardcore fans willing to pony up that money, and create the mirage that the fanbase is larger and more supportive as it is.

These are fun. I think it's smart to keep a set like this in the rotation, much like the Twins do with the '80s powder blues. And maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I favor the simpler "T" cap logo, which is also the one I most associate with Nolan Ryan's Rangers stint. It in no way matches the jersey font here, I realize, but I instantly identify it with that franchise. Of course, this could just be nostalgia speaking.

I didn't realize that. Is this because they intentionally wanted to distance themselves from it? I ask because it's not unheard of for a rebranded organization to want 100% of all focus on the new brand rather than muddying things up re-inserting the looks they've left behind, at least within the first few years under a new brand. I'm not suggesting that's the right approach, but it wouldn't be surprise me if a lesson like that isn't imprinted in some Marketing 101 textbook out there in the universe.

I agree with all of this, so well said. The Nets, for all intents and purposes, was a wholesale rebrand predicated by a relocation. In my mind, that's fair game for making a whole new identity switch that eschews franchise history. And if anything, they've done a better job than most teams when it comes to embracing historic looks from both the Dr. J era and what I'll call the Drazen Petrovic era. The Jazz aren't moving anywhere. I think someone mentioned it earlier, but this is akin to the Pistons switching to teal. It's completely unnecessary and is incongruous to its entire visual history.

Yeah, this doesn't seem novel. I wonder if this is more about removing language in the existing rulebook that might have otherwise prohibited this. A technical thing. Because I can't imagine there haven't been moments where a skill player who could also throw — Taysom Hill, Jim Jenson, Kordell Stewart, etc. etc. etc. — was deployed at some position other than QB.

So I guess the novelty of their other helmet finally wore off.